Comment Synergy of console + opensource (Score 1) 187
For all those people out there that say you should go get a system xyz and run abc on it, you are totally underestimating the primary advantage that homebrew console scenes have:
Everybody is developing on the exact same system.
This has tremendous implications in the development and testing of the software. You only have to develop for one platform, test for one platform, and support one platform. The software that anybody else out there writes for it will work for my box too. This is a tremendous advantage over getting some software that has some bugs/quirks with your slightly different "open" system.
For instance, on my PC (standard Dell Box), I encounter a pretty nasty bug in Mame where it will kill my video card until I did a hard reset.
I slapped the xbox version of Mame on my modded xbox and was running with no problems.
You do have other limitations with using a proprietary console, but you must realize that the same "feature" that makes console games cheaper and more reliable than PC games can pay off for opensource developers as well.
Everybody is developing on the exact same system.
This has tremendous implications in the development and testing of the software. You only have to develop for one platform, test for one platform, and support one platform. The software that anybody else out there writes for it will work for my box too. This is a tremendous advantage over getting some software that has some bugs/quirks with your slightly different "open" system.
For instance, on my PC (standard Dell Box), I encounter a pretty nasty bug in Mame where it will kill my video card until I did a hard reset.
I slapped the xbox version of Mame on my modded xbox and was running with no problems.
You do have other limitations with using a proprietary console, but you must realize that the same "feature" that makes console games cheaper and more reliable than PC games can pay off for opensource developers as well.
